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Up-to-the Minute PHP News, views and communityen-usTue, 31 Mar 2015 17:05:47 -050030http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/22216http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/22216
Mathias Noback has continued his series looking at the use of command busses in PHP applications. In this third part of his series, he answers some questions that have been asked by his own readers.

Each question comes with a portion of the question from the original author, an explanation and some code where needed to illustrate his point.

Link: http://php-and-symfony.matthiasnoback.nl/2015/01/some-questions-about-the-command-bus/]]>Mon, 12 Jan 2015 09:46:46 -0600http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/19617http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/19617
In this new post to the PHPClasses.org blog Manuel Lemos talks some about the recent introduction of PHP into Google's App Engine offerings.

During Google I/O 2013 event a Google manager said PHP runs on 75% of the Web sites. So they decided to finally support PHP as in their AppEngine hosting service. Read this article to understand why this puts an end to years of false claims that PHP was losing market, as well what it means to Web developers using PHP or other languages.

He looks at the App Engine PHP offering and looks at whether or not its a good platform to use for hosting your application. He points out some advantages and disadvantages (including no local file system access and no remote resource access). He also includes five reasons why the "web platform war is over" and why PHP has come out victorious:

Google Knows Because They Crawl the Whole Web

Google Does Not Influence Web Developers so much

Wordpress is the Dominant Blog Platform (not Blogger)

Programming Does Not Have to Be Beautiful

PHP Detractors Have the Wrong Focus

He admits, though, that PHP may not be dominant forever - it's not perfect, but there will always be a need for something that does what it can do (and does it well).

Link: http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/208-5-Reasons-Why-the-Web-Platform-War-is-Over-PHP-Won-with-75-says-Google.html]]>Wed, 22 May 2013 09:06:11 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/19215http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/19215
In this new post to his CodeDiesel site Sameer Borate looks at something that's been a controversial topic with developers (not just PHP) about storing binary data, like images, in a database instead of on the local file system.

There is much discussion and argument with no final say on the issue. In one of my recent project the same issue was raised; the client and myself discussing the benefits and drawback of storing the images into a database. The project needed storing around 50,000 images, so it was important to get the question resolved satisfactorily. After much deliberation we settled on using the file system. The major factor in the decision was that we needed the database and images decoupled as we would be having multiple databases using the same set of images.

He goes on to talk about some of the things you should consider when you're deciding if storing images in the database is the right thing for your application including:

The bloat that can come with storing binary data (larger database size)

Images usually serve faster when they come from the filesystem through the web server

BLOB (a common type for binary data storage) is variable-width and can degrade performance

You can read the rest of the reasons (and get more detail on the ones above) in the rest of the post.

]]>Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:16:45 -0600http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/17488http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/17488
On the LearnComputer.com site there's a new post comparing the benefits/downfalls of online versus classroom learning of PHP development. They list a few advantages and disadvantages of each.

There can be many factors in the decision to learn PHP online or to take a class in-person, and for some, this can be a difficult decision to make. This article discusses the pros and cons of each method of PHP training to help you find the learning method that is going to suit your needs best. PHP isn't a new programming language, and there is a wealth of information on it on the web for every level of proficiency. The question is whether these resources alone are sufficient to get you up-and-running with PHP quickly.

For the "online" section advantages include flexible schedules and more up to date content. The disadvantages are things like a prerequisite knowledge of using computers/the training software and that the instructor might only have "set hours" to answer questions and offer help. The "classroom" option advantages include the motivation of a regular meeting time and fewer technology hurdles to overcome. Disadvantages include the need for a time/in-person commitment and that the focus might be higher level than needed to appeal to a more mass audience.

]]>Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:22:00 -0600http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5178http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5178
Justin Silverton has posted a comparison between PHP and Perl, with the first part coming more from the PHP side comparing it to Perl and the second the opposite.

He starts off with some of the differences between the two langauges, including that PHP was made for the web, Perl was not and that PHP scripts take less overhead for the web server to run that Perl scripts as CGIs. There are also four larger topics that he looks at:

PHP has separate functions for case insensitive operations

PHP has inconsistent function naming

PHP has no lexical scope

PHP has too many functions in the main namespace

All but the top item (that one could be argued either way) are reasons that a Perl user might cite against using PHP. For each of the items, there's a bit of description following to give you a better idea where they're coming from.